Push Notifications Customers Won’t be Able to Resist
Got an app? You’ve probably considered using push notifications and their potential value in your marketing strategy. If you haven’t, you should. Some consider push notifications to be spammy, with a high potential for annoyance. Studies show that 68% of app users enable push notifications for the apps they download and 70% of them say such notifications are valuable. Push notifications are a permission-based service. As with any permission-based tool, it’s important to respect that license and use your notifications wisely; your audience will switch you off if you misuse such access. But actioned well, push notifications can help build trusted and valuable connections between your brand and your audience. Here are five tips on creating great push notifications that your customers won’t be able to resist.
Know what your audience wants
As with any type of communication, it’s important to understand who your audience is and what they’re likely respond to. There’s no point sending out push notifications about your grand sale on pool toys to families living in the middle of an arctic plain. While that’s an amplified example of what you need to look out for, many marketers do miss the boat when effectively communicating their sales and offers via push notifications for similar reasons.
The key thing to understand is what your audience is interested in hearing and why they’ve downloaded your app. If your company provides a news or informational service, then sending out notifications relative to specific news events will likely prove valuable. In the same way that a traffic app that alerts users to accidents or road hazards will benefit the end user and help build brand reputation by providing such utility. It’s important to understand that your audience does not need to see sales notifications three times a day. Understand the audience benefit of our app and ensure you’re maximizing this via your notifications.
The second critical element you need to keep in mind when reaching out to your audience via push notifications is what time’s best to reach them. Notifications sent at 3am will either largely go un-noticed, annoy your audience and possibly lead to your app being deleted. Within your push notification settings, you can set scheduled start and end dates for your messaging and establish send times relative to the local time zones of your users. Use the Local Push settings to ensure that your messages are going out at the optimum times.
You also need to consider when your messages are likely to see the best response – if your audience is primarily stay-at-home mums, your optimum send time is going to be vastly different than someone who’s targeting office workers. Do some research to understand when your audience is most likely to be active and/or most receptive to your notifications, and ensure you reach them when they want.
Know where your message will be most useful
Another element of push notifications to ensure your messages get shared by the right audience is by geo-targeting. This allows you to share your messages with audiences based on their geographic location. Although not everyone allows geo-tracking on their mobile device, many people do. This can prove extremely valuable in your push notification process.
For example, if you’re marketing a restaurant and you want to reach users who’ve downloaded your app within a certain geographic radius of your store to notify them of a new deal or menu item, you can. Such capacity can be great for eateries who want to reach office workers in the lunch time rush. Be careful though, any more than a couple of notifications of this sort per week could risk over doing and lose you subscribers. Success can be defined by a fine line.
(Source: Parse Blog, http://blog.parse.com/non-technical/dont-be-pushy-10-useful-tips-for-awesome-push-notifications/)
Know who you’re trying to reach and speak to them, directly
Personalization may be the most valuable aspect of push notifications. When you’re communicating with someone via their own mobile device, that’s a very personal thing. It’s a direct line of communications between you and them. With that perspective in mind, do you think sending people a generic notification is really the best way to cut through amongst the various other messages and updates they receive each day and make them take notice?
People love to be treated with priority; they love being shown that they’re important and that you’re listening to them. Though this may seem beyond the capacity of a push notification – it’s not. Taking the time to add in a level of personalisation can make a huge difference in your engagement and response rates.
For example, take a look at these two push notifications from Best Buy and Amazon:
Can you see the difference? Amazon’s notification are personalised, they’re directed at customers based on their purchase history. Best Buy’s messaging is not – they send the same, exact, message to all users of their app. Which do you think is more engaging? A customer who’s just purchased a range of baby gear is probably more likely to click through on a deal for related baby equipment than someone being hit with yet another Best Buy ‘Deal of the Day’.
Personalisation in this context is not necessarily about addressing people by their name. In actual fact, that’s often a big turn-off when it’s clearly an auto-generated message. What you should be focussing on is personalising the content. Segmenting your app users with the data you have available, this way you can reach specific segments of your audience with messages relevant to them. When they click through, take them to the pages they visit most often and show them the deals most relevant to them. Someone who buys a lot of basketball gear is probably not going to be as interested in your special on golf shoes. Again, keep the customer utility of your app in mind and use the cues you have to focus your message – the more personally tuned-in the better.
Know your analytics and engagement stats
If you’re not utilising the data available to you based on actions taken in response to your push notifications, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re sending out the same message over and over again and getting the same poor response, that’s a pretty good sign you need to change your messaging. The most significant advantage of the connected era is data. The ability to track and correlate user activity and actions and use that to better focus and refine your processes to optimise your results.
Check what’s working, test different types of messaging at different times of day and find out what works best for your audience. Generic guides are great to get you thinking and show you what’s possible. Monitor what’s working for others and remember the only true rule is to remember what your audience wants. Your unique specific group of target customers may use their apps differently to others. There may be quirks that you’ll only find out through listening and experimentation. The only way you can accurately trace such instances is through your analytics. Examine what works, improve where you can and refine often.
There’s a heap of opportunity in push notifications and the direct connection with your audience provided via this method, a heap of ways for brands to maximise the utility of their apps whilst also helping build their brand and expand the reach of their messaging. The most important thing to keep in mind is that push notifications are about what your audience wants to hear and not necessarily what you want to tell them. Keep that in mind and you’ll be on your way to maximising success via this outreach option.
Why Users Mute Push Notifications
Do you want to communicate with the people who downloaded your app even when they’re not using it?
Push notifications can accomplish this.
You can send notifications directly to each user’s device, and it will appear on their screen as if they just received a text message.
Sounds like a great way to engage with your audience, right?
There’s not a clear black and white answer here. Push notifications can be helpful, but only when they’re used properly.
If you’re improperly taking advantage of this tool, then it’s going to have the opposite effect. Instead, users will mute your notifications.
That’s a place that you don’t want to find yourself in.
So whether you have an app that’s already been launched or you’re still developing a mobile app, you need to be thinking about push notifications.
On average, more than half of app users enable push notifications.
More Android users enable push notifications than iOS users, but Android dominates the global market share. So it’s safe to say that the majority of people want to get push notifications.
But with that said, there are certain reasons that force a user to turn these notifications off.
If you’ve been getting muted or you’re trying to avoid getting muted, this is the perfect guide for you. I’ll explain why app users mute push notifications and how you can send notificationswithout getting turned off.
Because they are annoying
52% of app users say that push notifications are an annoying distraction.
However, 26% of users said that they were grateful for push notifications because they get alerts about their interests.
Another 20% of app users stated that notifications enhance productivity. They are able to receive important and timely information without having to launch the app because of push notifications.
So it’s clear that the opinions are split about this subject. However, the fact that over 50% of users find them annoying is just too large of a number to ignore.
The question now changes to, “why are they so annoying?”
I blame marketers for this problem. To sum it up, marketers overuse push notifications. They think that just because someone has downloaded an app that they have a new best friend.
Marketers believe that the users will be so excited about any communication from the app.
But this is obviously not the case.
Let me rewind for a minute here. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m definitely not trying to give marketing experts a bad name. Without your marketing department, your app wouldn’t be successful.
However, you’ve got to understand how marketers think. It’s all about numbers for them.
They are looking at the total number of people who downloaded your app. If half of them mute your notifications, the marketers don’t care. Your marketing team assumes that they can make up for those losses just by sheer volume and by targeting the people who still have them turned on.
In theory, it’s not a bad idea. But that’s not how you want to treat your app users.
You want as many people as possible to be engaged and satisfied with your app. So alienating half of your audience is the wrong approach.
Annoying your user base can cause even more damage than you think. Sending too many push notifications can cause your users to stop using your app altogether.
This a problem that’s going to be much harder to recover from.
Here’s an argument that I’ve heard from marketing teams that I’ve consulted with on this matter.
“It’s not a big deal if the notifications get muted because the people will still continue using the app. We can make money every time they use it.”
Well, according to the data above, that argument can be thrown right out of the window. App abandonment is a serious problem. If those rates get too high, it could be the downfall of your company.
You can decrease the chances of abandonment if you pump the breaks on your push notification strategy. Re-evaluate how often you’re sending out these notifications and figure out what users want to hear from you.
This brings us to our next point.
The ones that aren’t annoying are:
Not all push notifications are annoying.
As we discussed earlier, research shows that just under half of users found them to be helpful. They get alerts and timely information without having to open the app. This enhances their experience with your company.
Something else that you need to consider about push notifications is what type of app you have. Depending on your industry, you’ll have a greater chance of having higher opt-in rates.
As you can see from the data, people just don’t want push notifications from certain industries.
Look at the bottom three on this list.
It makes sense that people don’t want to be notified about travel deals on a daily or weekly basis if they’re only taking one or two vacations all year.
There are already enough outlets available for people to get their news. They don’t want to get a notification every time something happens.
As for social media, users get enough of that throughout their day. Not everyone wants their phone to buzz every time a picture gets liked.
But with that said, if your app doesn’t fall within the top industries for push notification opt-ins, you can still reduce the chances of getting muted.
Here’s what all notifications that aren’t perceived as annoying have in common:
Personalized
Notifications have to be relevant to each user. You can’t just send a blanket mass-message to everyone who has your app. That’s ineffective.
To show you what I’m talking about, I’m going to use really obvious examples to help paint a picture.
Let’s say you have an ecommerce store and your mobile app is another platform for customers to shop. You wouldn’t want to send notifications about dresses and skirts going on sale to male users.
It’s not personal, it’s irrelevant, and it’s annoying. That’s a fast way to get people to mute your notifications.
But if you send something more personal, like a discount that’s related to something the user has purchased in the past, it will definitely increase their engagement.
You’ll also see an increase in your conversion rates as well.
Here’s another example. Let’s say your app is hosting or sponsoring an event. Maybe your app is in the sports industry, and you’re sponsoring a surf contest in southern California.
Sending a push notification could be a great way to increase attendance at the event, right?
Not if you’re sending the notification to people who live in Minnesota, Maine, or New Jersey.
Instead, it would make much more sense if you were to send that push notification to people who live within reasonable driving distance to the event.
Still not convinced that your notifications have to be personalized? Well, studies show that personalized offers is the number one type of push notification that app users want to receive.
On top of the 48% of people who want personalized offers, an additional 34% of users want to receive new content based on their personal preferences as well.
So over 80% of respondents cited some form of personalization as the type of notification that they want to receive the most.
You just can’t argue with numbers like that.
Not sent very often
Just because you’re sending a personalized offer to your app users, it doesn’t mean that you should send out notifications every day.
Be selective.
Put lots of thought into each notification that you send and make sure that you do this very sparingly.
Remember, the reason why people mute notifications is because they’re annoying. As we saw earlier, sending too many notifications in a week can be so annoying that it will cause people to stop using your app altogether.
So how often should you send notifications?
I’d say once a week, at most. But probably even less. You can limit this to two or three times per month if you really want to eliminate the chances of getting muted.
Take a look at this data. It shows how many weekly push notifications from one app cause users to disable notifications for that app.
As you can see, even sending two or more push notifications in a week can cause 37% of people to mute notifications for your app.
Sending one per week has a much lower opt-out rate at just 10%. But with that said, people are still muting notifications if you send one per week. That’s why I recommended sending a little bit less than that.
But like we discussed earlier, these numbers will vary slightly depending on your industry.
Have immediate value
People won’t mute push notifications if they add immediate value. Certain apps send notifications that are timely and absolutely necessary based on the needs and functionality of the app.
For example, let’s use a popular app like Uber as an example.
You request a ride using the Uber app. While you still have the app open, it will show you how long until your car arrives. Let’s say that your ride will be at your pick up location in 15 minutes.
Nobody wants to check their phone or wristwatch every few minutes to see when they need to be ready. People also don’t want to just stare mindlessly at the app while tracking the GPS location of their driver.
Users also don’t want to have to stand outside for 15 minutes waiting for their driver to arrive.
That’s when push notifications come in handy. Getting notified that your Uber has arrived is definitely something that people want to see.
That’s because it makes the user’s life easier and adds immediate value. They know that after their ride has been requested, they don’t have to do anything except wait for their notification that the car has arrived.
Remember the graph we saw earlier about the top industries for push notification opt-ins? Ride sharing was at the top of that list with a 79% opt-in rate. So it’s obvious that this model is successful.
The food and beverage industry was second on the list with a 60% opt-in rate.
Again, that’s because those notifications add immediate value. Getting a notification that your pizza has arrived makes things easier for the app user and enhances their experience.
So think of ways you can apply this concept to your app the next time you want to send a notification. If it’s not adding immediate value, you should probably think twice before you hit send.
Give a discount on a flash sale
What do consumers love more than anything?
Getting discounts and free stuff. So if you’re sending push notifications about a flash sale or some kind of deal, users won’t think that it’s annoying.
Just make sure that you’re not doing it too often.
This is a great strategy to boost sales on your app as well. Obviously, the user downloaded your app because they have some kind of interest in your brand.
Either they’ve bought something from your company in the past or planned to do so in the future.
Sending a push notification with a discount could be the driving force behind getting a conversion.
Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about from Charlotte Russe.
Users won’t be annoyed by this notification because they have the opportunity to buy something at a discounted rate.
They wouldn’t have known about this deal unless they happened to open up the app during that time frame.
So rather than seeing this as an annoyance, users will be grateful that they were sent a push notification that can save them some money.
If you’re selling products or services through your app, I highly recommend that you employ this push notification strategy.
How to get people to turn on notifications again
Some of you may have found this guide when it was too late. People have already muted your push notifications.
Hopefully, you didn’t send them too many to the point where they completely abandoned the app.
So how do you get users who still have the app installed to enable push notifications after muting them? It may not sound possible since you obviously can’t send them a notification, but there’s still hope.
Don’t forget about your other marketing channels. When a user signed up for your app or created a profile, you may have asked for their email address.
Send them an email and explain how the push notifications will improve their life.
Give them a relevant offer. Send them something for free.
You can also promote these offers on other marketing channels as well, such as your Facebook or Instagram page.
Let your followers know that you’ll be periodically sending free gifts or discounts in the form of push notifications.
Once you get people to opt-in to your notifications, make sure you follow the tips we talked about earlier so you won’t annoy them.
Conclusion
Push notifications are a great way to communicate with your app users, but only if they’re used properly and sparingly.
People turn off push notifications because they are already annoyed by too many things in their life. They don’t want another thing to annoy them.
But there are certain types of notifications that people don’t find annoying. Those are push notifications that:
- are personalized
- don’t get sent too often
- add immediate value
- offer free stuff and discounts
Keep this information in mind when you’re coming up with a push notification strategy for your app.
Refer back to the data and research that I outlined throughout this guide.
If you follow these tips, fewer users will mute your notifications, which will increase their engagement.